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Oxford Handbooks Online ( The evolution of empathizing and systemizing: assortative mating of two strong systemizers Oxfordand the Handbooks cause of autism Online The evolution of empathizing and systemizing: assortative mating of two strong systemizers and the cause of autism Simon Baron-Cohen Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology Edited by Louise Barrett and Robin Dunbar Print Publication Date: Apr Subject: Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive 2007 Neuroscience Online Publication Date: Sep DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198568308.013.0016 2012 Abstract and Keywords This article discusses two cognitive processes, empathising and systemising, in terms of sex differences and the implications of these for evolutionary psychology. It also discusses the theory that assortative mating of two strong systemisers is a cause of autism, a neurodevelopmental condition involving empathy impairment alongside hypersystemising. Empathising is the drive to identify another person's emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion. Empathy is a skill (or a set of skills). It defines mindreading as the ability to interpret one's own or another agent's actions as driven by mental states. The model in the article shows the ontogenesis of a theory of mind in the first four years of life, and justifies the existence of four components on the basis of developmental competence and neuropsychological dissociation. Keywords: cognitive processes, evolutionary psychology, assortative mating, systemisers, autism, emotion, empathy, mindreading, ontogenesis, neuropsychological dissociation 16.1. Introduction In this chapter, I discuss two cognitive processes, empathizing and systemizing, in terms of sex differences and the implications of these for evolutionary psychology. I then discuss the theory that assortative mating of two strong systemizers is a cause of autism, Page 1 of 27 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: University of Cambridge; date: 08 March 2016 The evolution of empathizing and systemizing: assortative mating of two strong systemizers and the cause of autism a neurodevelopmental condition involving empathy impairment alongside hyper- systemizing. 16.2. What is empathizing? Empathizing is the drive to identify another person's emotions and thoughts, and to respond to these with an appropriate emotion (Davis, 1994). Empathy is a skill (or a set of skills). As with any other skill, we all vary in it. In the same way that we can think about why someone is talented or average or even disabled in these other areas, so we can think about individual differences in empathy. 16.2.1. The development of empathizing: the ‘mindreading system’ (1994) Click to view larger Fig. 16.1 Baron-Cohen's (1994) model of the mindreading system. ID, Intentionality Detector; EDD, Eye Direction Detector; SAM, Shared Attention Mechanism; ToMM, Theory of Mind Mechanism. In 1994, I proposed a model to specify the neurocognitive mechanisms that comprise the ‘mindreading system’ (Baron-Cohen, 1994, 1995). Mindreading is defined as the ability to interpret one's own or another agent's actions as driven by mental states. The model was proposed in order to explain (a) ontogenesis of a theory of mind, and (b) neurocognitive dissociations that are seen in children with or without autism. The model is shown in Page 2 of 27 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: University of Cambridge; date: 08 March 2016 The evolution of empathizing and systemizing: assortative mating of two strong systemizers and the cause of autism Figure 16.1 and contains four components: ID, or the Intentionality Detector; EDD, or the Eye Direction Detector; SAM, or the (p. 214) Shared Attention Mechanism; and finally ToMM, or the Theory of Mind Mechanism. ID and EDD build ‘dyadic’ representations of simple mental states. ID automatically interprets or represents an agent's self-propelled movement as a desire or goal-directed movement, a sign of its agency, or an entity with volition (Premack, 1990). For example, ID interprets an animate-like moving shape as ‘it wants x’, or ‘it has goal y’. EDD automatically interprets or represents eyelike stimuli as ‘looking at me’ or ‘looking at something else’. That is, EDD registers that an entity with eyes can perceive. Both ID and EDD are developmentally prior to the other two mechanisms, and are active early in infancy. SAM is developmentally more advanced and comes on line at the end of the first year of life. SAM automatically interprets or represents if the self and another agent are (or are not) perceiving the same event. SAM does this by building ‘tri-adic’ representations. For example, where ID can build the dyadic representation ‘Mother wants the cup’ and where EDD can build the dyadic representation ‘Mother sees the cup’, SAM can build the triadic representation ‘Mother sees that I see the cup’. As is apparent, triadic representations involve embedding or recursion. [A dyadic representation (‘I see a cup’) is embedded within another dyadic representation (‘Mum sees the cup’) to produce this triadic representation.] SAM takes its input from ID and EDD, and triadic representations are made out of dyadic representations. SAM typically functions from 9 to 14 months of age, and allows ‘joint attention’ behaviours such as protodeclarative pointing and gaze monitoring (Scaife and Bruner, 1975). ToMM allows an epistemic mental state to be represented (e.g. ‘Mother thinks this cup contains water’ or ‘Mother pretends this cup contains water’), and it integrates the full set of mental state concepts (including emotions) into a theory. ToMM develops between 2 and 4 years of age, and allows pretend play (Leslie, 1987), understanding of false belief (Wimmer and Perner, 1983), and understanding of the relationships between mental states (Wellman, 1990). An example of the latter is the seeing-leads-to-knowing principle (Pratt and Bryant, 1990), where the typical 3 year old can infer that if someone has seen an event, then he will know about it. Page 3 of 27 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: University of Cambridge; date: 08 March 2016 The evolution of empathizing and systemizing: assortative mating of two strong systemizers and the cause of autism Click to view larger Fig. 16.2 Baron-Cohen's (2005) model of empathizing. TED, The Emotion Detector; TESS, The Empathizing SyStem. Other abbreviations as in Figure 16.1. The model shows the ontogenesis of a theory of mind in the first 4 years of life, and justifies the existence of four components on the basis of developmental competence and neuropsychological dissociation. In terms of developmental competence, joint attention does not appear possible until 9–14 months of age, and joint attention appears to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for understanding epistemic mental states (Baron- Cohen, 1991; Baron-Cohen and Swettenham, 1996). There appears to be a developmental lag between acquiring SAM and ToMM, suggesting that these two mechanisms are dissociable. In terms of neuropsychological dissociation, congenitally blind children can ultimately develop joint (auditory or tactile) attention, using the amodal ID rather than the visual EDD route. Children with autism appear able to represent the dyadic mental states of seeing and wanting, but show delays in shared attention (Baron-Cohen, 1989b) and in understanding false belief (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985; Baron-Cohen, 1989a)—that is, in acquiring SAM and ultimately ToMM. It is this specific developmental delay that suggests that SAM is dissociable from EDD. (p. 215) 16.2.2. Short-comings of the 1994 model: the ‘empathizing system’ (2005) The 1994 model of the mindreading system was revised in 2005 because of certain omissions and too narrow a focus. The key omission was that information about affective states, available to the infant perceptual system, had no dedicated neurocognitive Page 4 of 27 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2015. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy). Subscriber: University of Cambridge; date: 08 March 2016 The evolution of empathizing and systemizing: assortative mating of two strong systemizers and the cause of autism mechanism. In Figure 16.2, the revised model (Baron-Cohen, 2005) is shown and now includes a new fifth component: TED, or The Emotion Detector. A particular problem for any account of the distinction between autism and psychopathy is the fact that the concept of mindreading (or theory of mind) makes no reference to the affective state in the observer triggered by recognition of another's mental state. For this reason, the revised model no longer focuses on ‘mindreading’ but rather focuses on ‘empathizing’, and also includes a new sixth component, TESS, or The Empathizing SyStem. Where the 1994 mindreading system was a model of a passive observer (all the components had simple decoding functions), the 2005 empathizing system is a model of an observer impelled towards action (because an emotion is triggered in the observer which typically motivates the observer to respond to the other person).
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